


A Star Was Burning

by kairis



Category: Death Note
Genre: Angst, Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Depression, Friendship, Gen, Historical References, Orphans, Pre-Canon, War, essentially follows mello's entire life, features some OCs, includes pre canon and events that happen in canon as well, revolves around a lot of headcanon and interpretation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-04-17 18:21:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4676663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kairis/pseuds/kairis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mihael Keehl, until death does him in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is related to the fic "Echo" that I published up on here a month or so ago. It's not going to be necessary to read, but the events in it do happen later in this fic. I'm still deciding on whether to just incorporate it as part of a chapter and delete the one shot I published. A lot of this fic revolves around my own headcanon about Mello, especially about his past (because, well, there's next to nothing about his past in the actual Death Note canon). There will not be romance included in it (sorry? Frankly it's not the purpose of this entire fic to include romance at all). The chapters are going to be all interrelated, but don't follow a central plot until we get to Mello chasing after Kira.  
> Sorry for the overly long note at the beginning. If you have to get anything out of this note, it's that this fic follows the manga timeline.

It was the first time in months that they stepped outside the confines of the underground cement lined world of dim lights and cramped, chilly caverns. Mihael was excited, squeezing Aleksander’s bare hand with his own wool gloved hand. He swung his older brother’s arm back and forth while they stood in line, waiting for the bus to open its mechanical doors to welcome them. The chilly nip to the breeze blowing through the crowd of civilians at the edge of the pothole littered street ruffled their greasy hair.

There were soldiers in dark uniforms and heavy winter coats shouting, ordering the crowd around in a language that they couldn’t quite understand. The words didn’t need translation, though.

Aleksander could interpret the soldiers’ words purely by their tone.

It’s over. Get on the bus.

He could only hope what he feared was not going to come to them. The world couldn’t be unfair enough to let that happen. Here he was with his little brother, his innocent little brother who still needed his hand to be held and still didn’t understand that their parents were gone for good, being loaded onto a bus that he knew nothing of its destination. It was frightening not knowing where they're going to go, whether they're about to meet the same fate of their parents, bodies unable to be located in complete pieces, left stranded to be found by some unlucky soul collecting bodies.

On the bus, he and Mihael were squashed onto faux leather seats that were spilling moldy stuffing from giant cracks. The man sharing the seat with them reeked of body odor and tobacco. Mihael made a disappointed expression towards Aleksander, jutting his lower lip out in a pout. He was disappointed that instead of being able to finally run around in the sloshy snow outside, he was being loaded onto a crowded bus. To console his brother before a fit surged up, Aleksander patted the crown of his head and placed him on top of his lap.

“We can't go play outside right now. I'm sorry,” Aleksander murmured to his brother's little ear. "How about we play a game on the bus?"

It definitely wasn't a substitute for the months they’d spent ridden to the basement of their home and underground bunker as the world around them was shelled to rubble. But Aleksander hoped it would be good enough to occupy the _almost_ two year old's mind (Mihael made a point to anyone who asked his age that he was _almost_ two years old). At least for a little while, maybe until Mihael felt drowsy and dozed off.

“What game?” Mihael tilted his head back to look at his brother's face, taking in his sharp features and darkened blond hair.

“I spy. Do you know that game?”

The engine of the bus rumbled, signalling that the departure was about to begin. Aleksander gripped a little tighter to Mihael's tiny body, trying to ignore the bones he could easily feel while barely pressing against the little boy’s skin. Being secluded underground for nearly three months and subjected to food rations and the inability to leave any closed structure had not been good for Mihael's development. His ribs poked through his skin, and his cheeks had lost a good amount of their chubby composition.

“Yeah. I know.” The corners of Mihael's mouth tugged upwards in a small smile.

“Alright then, I'll start,” Aleksander replied.

They played the game for some time, speaking quietly as not to disturb the other passengers of the bus. The game seemed to be a good influence on Mihael, letting him focus on new sights and matching descriptions of them. He hadn't been outside of the bunker in weeks, and even before that had been restricted to staying in the dark basement of the house for almost a month. The weak autumn sunlight wasn't unfamiliar to him, but he was certainly comforted by it and its ability to light up and clearly show his surroundings. Aleksander felt the exact opposite.

He had known Vukovar before it was decimated by air raids, bombs, and artillery shelling. The view he saw from the grainy window sickened him straight to his stomach. Entire streets were stripped of their pavement, buildings and homes pockmarked with artillery, and melting gray slush littered the garbage heaps on the torn apart sidewalk. The bus was heading away from the center of town, which had been the main target of the opposing side, but the destruction was not any less the farther they moved. There were still dilapidated structures, and the stench of smoke and gasoline seeped through the bus's exterior. An abandoned body or two were seen splayed out on the street or sidewalk, and twice the bus passed by a pile of lifeless bodies stacked carelessly on top of each other by soldiers armed with machine guns.

Aleksander wanted to shield Mihael's eyes, stop the curious boy from seeing the horrible sights of his hometown's destruction. He tried desperately to bring Mihael's attention to the passengers of the bus, pointing out in their game that he spied a red, soft object (an older woman's scarf) and something that was shiny and thin (the small chain necklace the man sitting next to them was wearing), but Mihael kept choosing to “spy” objects outside the bus. He pointed out the gray shell of an old car flipped over and its bullet punched metal covering and a bare, ashen tree that was partially on fire at its top branches.

Almost forty five minutes later of bus traveling, the driver parked at the edge of the highway. They were clearly in the middle of farmland, though it wasn't like Croatia had much useable farmland now. The fields surrounding either side of the highway were either barren and and scattered with dying and wilting brown plants or scorched from fires.

Another soldier spoke up, requesting for someone to translate from Serbian to Croatian. The man beside Aleksander and Mihael stood up slowly, raising a hand in acknowledgement. The soldier gave a grunt and began speaking, leaving the man to translate in between his pauses.

They were heading to Osijek. Some passengers were going to be unloaded from the bus to await another bus that would transport them to another city. Once they arrived at Osijek, the Croatian government would settle them down in refugee housing.

There was no mention of the fact that Osijek was also under siege from the Serbs, just as Vukovar had been for the past three months. That, apparently, held no meaning or significance.

The majority of the passengers were then told to exit the bus, including the man sitting with Aleksander and Mihael. All that remained from before were a handful of young children and adults who were likely the parents of said children. Civilians sporting obvious injuries like broken bones and scrapes were forced off the bus, along with healthy appearing adults as well (Aleksander was judging by what was considered healthy after staying underground for almost three months. Those forced off the bus all had a pallor from lack of sunlight, sunken cheeks from malnourishment, and many had strong body odor from the bomb shelter's lack of accessibility to water). A few of the soldiers who had been aboard the bus exited as well, corralling the civilians into a crowd on the muddy side of the road by the threats of their loaded rifles.

“I can feel your heart.” Mihael had leaned his head back again to look up at his brother.

Aleksander’s heart had been beating furiously with fear the moment the bus had came to a halt. He had been so sure for those moments that this was the end. That everyone was to be forced from the bus to meet their deaths in the middle of countryside, to be gunned down by a firing squad. That his little brother would have to be ripped to shreds by ammunition or watch tens of people be shot.

“You can?” Aleksander asked. He stretched his lips to fit a faked smile across them, to give some sort of reassurance to Mihael.

Mihael nodded. “It’s going fast.”

“Yeah, it is. I’m just…” Aleksander tried to figure out a believable lie. He couldn’t let Mihael know he had just been fearing for their lives. “I’m just excited that we’ll be living somewhere new.”

Mihael left it at that, nodding in agreement with his brother. Aleksander’s heartbeat started to slow down after the bus began accelerating down the road, leaving behind the mass of people and the few soldiers. The only conclusion he could summon himself to believe was that those individuals they were speeding away from were on their way to meet death. There was no other reason.

At least it wasn’t him. Or Mihael.

It was sickening.

He was glad that others were dying.

His arm wrapped carefully over his brother’s little waist, Aleksander tried to shoulder that disturbing thought away. It was okay to think this. It was perfectly acceptable to be grateful for his life being spared.

“Are Mama and Papa going to live with us?” Mihael asked, breaking into Aleksander's stream of thoughts.

Aleksander felt his gut wrench as the bus jumped over a large crack in the road. He didn't feel the strength it took to answer that question again.

****

Osijek was almost in as bad a shape as Vukovar was. The city Aleksander had always pictured as a majestic center of baroque culture and arts was worn down with bullet holes and heavy smoke hanging around the high coral tile roof lines suffering from gaping holes.

They were not dropped off at the foot of a government refugee agency or any sort of official looking establishment. The bus jerked to a sudden halt before the city limits, where at the side of the cracked road was a large white tent set up. A bright red cross was painted on the flaps of the tent's opening. All of the passengers were unloaded in an orderly fashion to approach the tent. After the driver of the bus gave a quick salute to the man standing in the entryway of the tent, the bus made a wide u-turn and headed shakily back towards the way it had come from before.

Aleksander had hoisted Mihael in his arms, letting his little brother rest his head on his shoulder. Mihael watched with dull eyes as the bus drove further and further away, eventually becoming a speck in the distance. He was exhausted after such a long day and hadn't been able to fall asleep on the bus. Aleksander patted Mihael's back with a gentle hand as he listened to the speech the man in the entryway was giving.

Because of the large numbers of citizens who had fled from Osijek when the siege began, there was space for the refugees of Vukovar to temporarily stay on Osijek until either the war was concluded or Vukovar was recaptured. The man said nothing about how long either of those would take, however. Everyone present would register to be assigned housing and assistance in finances and finding work in Osijek. The Red Cross would be providing free medical examinations for the refugees, as well.

And after all of that, they could return home.

“No, wait, let me correct myself.” The man cleared his throat loudly. “You will be able to go to your _new_ homes.”

****

It was not home.

Aleksander hadn't been expecting to receive top of the line housing in Osijek, but he had been expecting to live somewhere decent enough so that neither he nor Mihael felt so incredibly uncomfortable.

The apartment had only two rooms: a shower room and a large empty room that combined the functions of living, cooking, eating, and sleeping. The room was essentially in the shape of a square, with an added extension to include the kitchen that was even with the shower room's width. There were sparse furnishings; a bare mattress was laying in the farthest left corner of the room and in front of a large window, there were three chairs to accompany a lopsided wooden table before one of the windows lining the only wall not shared by another apartment, and the kitchen only contained a small gas range, a chipped porcelain sink whose pipes were visible connecting through the browning wallpaper, a small refrigerator that appeared to have been colored pure white at some point, and a tall cabinet made of dark wood. The shower room only contained a showerhead fitted on the wall across from the door and a rusted metal drain centered in the middle of the small tiled room. There was no toilet. The toilets were public, at the end of the floor's hallway beside the staircase.

The floor was a boarded with a dull gray wood that contrasted unpleasantly with the peachy wallpaper that was peeling in some places and browning in others. The chilly temperature from outside seeped in through the building’s concrete exterior, making it almost possible for Aleksander to see his and Mihael’s breath when they exhaled.

Mihael wasn’t concerned about the state of their new home. He could barely remember much else other than the bomb shelter they’d spent so long confined to. As Aleksander surveyed the apartment and began to reread several forms of paperwork that had been issued to him by the refugee counselors, Mihael carried out his own survey. He found that there was a large silvery spider web in the empty cabinet, but the only spider Mihael found inside of it had keeled over onto its back with its legs scrunched up, completely devoid of life and lying hopelessly in its dusty home. He reached up on his toes and stretched his arms as far as possible to turn one of the faucet handles of the sink on. Clear water came dribbling out of the faucet and down the drain, and Mihael grinned at this. He hadn’t ever used a sink before.

There was a lot more exploring for Mihael to do throughout the apartment. He climbed on top of each of the rickety metal chairs, deciding that he didn’t like the squeaking noise each chair made as he put weight on it. Laying on top of the mattress, Mihael ran his fingers over the soft threaded material, tracing the light patterns of some unknown flower. He explored the shower room, wondering whether Aleksander would be mad at him if he tried turning the knobs of the shower on also, but he didn’t need to wait for an answer. Aleksander had come in and told him they can wash up later, after they eat dinner.

Mihael ended up dragging one of the metal chairs across the floor, the metal legs of the chair protesting loudly against the wood floorboards, and sitting on it to see the view outside one of the windows. He felt an excited tingling rising in his fingertips. He could see _everything_ from where he was. The gray sky, the gaping holes of tiled roofs, bare trees swaying in the breeze…

It was another first for him, and he took in all the scenery he could with hungry eyes. Mihael clung to the windowsill, scooting the chair all the way up against the wall to make sure he didn’t miss anything at all. He pushed his palms against the windowsill to stand up. There was a plane soaring overhead, and he didn’t want to lose sight of it.

“Mihael!”

Then there was the sound of feet pounding against the floor, running towards him. Suddenly, he felt warm hands lift him up off the chair from underneath his armpits. Aleksander looked panicked, worry spread throughout his face. He set Mihael down on the floor and lowered himself to be on eye level with his younger brother.

“Don’t stand so close to the window.” Aleksander locked eyes with Mihael. “It’s not safe.”

The excitement that had flooded Mihael earlier drained out quickly. His brows furrowed in confusion, and the grin he’d worn dissipated.

“Why?”

That was Mihael’s favorite question to ask ever since he’d learned to speak.. He was always asking why to everything. Sometimes it would be simple things, like why dogs barked or why babies cried.

Other times, the questions were debilitating.

Why were Mama and Papa not with them?

Why couldn’t he go outside?

Why did Mama and Papa _leave_?

Aleksander knew that Mihael never meant those questions out of desire to make sick to his stomach with anxiety of how to answer such a complicated question to a toddler. He was just curious. It was the same curiosity that made him ask about why babies cried and dogs barked and made him go scouring all over the apartment in search of everything and anything new.

That said, he still felt the anxiety clutching and scratching at him from the inside. He never wanted to lie to Mihael. Mihael was smart and very perceptive. He would figure out eventually that he’d been lied to. It just didn’t sit well with Aleksander’s conscience either to deceive Mihael.

But, just as it was difficult and necessary to have confined himself and his little brother to a dark and cramped underground safety of a bomb shelter when their city was being bombarded, it was necessary to lie and stretch the truth.

“You’ll get hurt.” Aleksander spoke slowly, making sure that Mihael understood what he said.

He might understand that the world he lived in was one full of conflict, but Aleksander reasoned that Mihael wouldn’t comprehend that anyone could stoop low enough to hurt others who were uninvolved in the conflict. He couldn’t possibly understand the threat of being an easy sniping target for a Serbian infiltrator or that it was possible that their building could be struck by artillery at any moment.

“Why?” Mihael repeated.

“We have to be careful, okay?” Aleksander tried to redirect Mihael’s attention.

That was much better than letting someone so young be forced to understand the bitterness and harsh reality of the adult world.

“Can you promise me?” Aleksander prodded, letting a faint smile play on his thin lips. “That you’ll always be careful.”

“Yes!” Mihael nodded vigorously. “Always!”

The enthusiasm from his brother in that moment was enough to almost completely lull away the sickness of Aleksander’s insides.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did a lot of research to make sure everything is historically accurate, however there's still some things in it that are probable to not have happened. If you can spot them, let's just turn a blind eye to it and claim it in the name of artistic license.
> 
> I'm shooting for this to be approximately 20-25 chapters.
> 
> Major props out to morphinejunkie on tumblr!! Our very long discussion about Mello is partially what motivated me to get my thoughts into a coherent story.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I added in the fic "Echo" in this chapter, because it takes place during this chapter, and I wanted it to be included. I deleted the original one shot I posted of it.

The sensation of small sock covered feet and cold tiny hands crawling over his chest was usually how days began. Mihael now rose at the hours of the morning that Aleksander had once dubbed as ungodly (that was before their mother scolded him for joking so carelessly about God), sometime in between 5:00 and 7:00. Aleksander had been accustomed to the schedule of living in the bomb shelter; everyone was to wake up at the same time, eat at the same time, and go about what they could do in their spare time. It was not a welcome feeling to be forced awake by Mihael so early.

He kept that to himself, though.

Next would come the morning rituals of washing up and preparing breakfast. Aleksander would lead Mihael into the shower room, where they’d both shower at the same time to conserve the costs of water. The shower’s weak spray of water was always an icy cold temperature, as Aleksander had found out that the apartment block lacked any working heating. Once they’d scrubbed away any grime and unpleasant smells from their bodies, Aleksander dressed himself in the navy blue work uniform and bundled Mihael up in his clothes and sat him down at the table.

Mihael watched with his head resting on top of his arms upon the table as Aleksander started the range up and moved around the kitchen to prepare breakfast. Most of the time, breakfast was the same meal over and over again every day of the week except for Sunday. Sunday’s breakfast would be the same bland porridge as the rest of the week, except for the snippets of sausage Aleksander would pour into Mihael’s bowl. Mihael never noticed that Aleksander’s bowl of porridge always lacked the browned bits of sausage poking through the grains of his soggy porridge every Sunday.

During breakfast, Mihael would speed on about different things he’d thought about from the day before or about his dreams from last night. Aleksander usually only idly listened, as he barely was awake from his own sleep yet. It was often hard for him to fall asleep to the sounds playing outside of the apartment; it was very different to live in the middle of a city rather than the suburbs. Despite the threats of ongoing violence from shelling, there were still plenty of people making ruckus outside on the streets. When it was able to be determined what they were shouting or arguing about, it was usually about guns or bread.

The two most necessary items of wartime.

After breakfast, which usually didn’t last very long (Mihael ate very quickly because he was always eager to follow after Aleksander, who always ate with ravenous hunger), Aleksander spent time cleaning as much as possible. He scrubbed the dishes they had (a few plates, two chipped mugs, and a few forks, all salvaged from the rubble of the house Vukovar) with the flaky soap bar used in the shower, swept away crumbs from last night’s dinner underneath the table with a rag, and started soaking clothes in the sink basin to be washed.

Mihael helped sometimes, offering to chase after and smash bugs that ran around the kitchen when the cabinet was opened up and to wipe the table down after eating. Other times, he watched Aleksander from laying on top of the mattress with dull eyes. It seemed to him that Aleksander was doing a lot of unnecessary work. Mihael didn’t care if he could see dust floating in the air or if his clothes smelled a little bit like stale bread and sweat.

What Mihael considered the best part of the day was the part Aleksander absolutely dreaded with as much emotion as he could summon. Working was purely exhausting in all forms. He hated walking to the bus stop carrying Mihael, while thinking about how vulnerable they were to be shot by soldiers or to be mugged by desperate civilians (to his dismay, Aleksander barely had anything that was worth being stolen, unless Mihael counted). Getting to work was half the burden.

He couldn’t leave Mihael behind, all alone hours past the sun sank down in the apartment. Aleksander tried to reason the moment he’d received notice from the management of the factory that he’d been hired that Mihael would be fine for several hours on his own. Already, Aleksander was sure that Mihael was maturing much faster than other children his age; he spoke in longer sentences, rarely let his temper rise much more than a few distressed tears and silent sniffling, and was rapidly becoming much more aware of the emotions of other people.

But of course, if something were to happen, just anything...Aleksander didn’t think he could live with himself. If he came home to an empty apartment or Mihael in any state except for his usual excited and curious nature, Aleksander was sure to be the blame for it.

So he brought Mihael with him every day, six times a week to the expansive metal sheet building that manufactured the very material fired from the barrels of their homeland’s soldiers.

Mihael loved the factory. He loved to toddle around the big machinery and watch the metallic shells fall into big collecting vats, listening to the jingling and clanging of the machines turning out the bullets. He loved nothing more than to sit patiently behind his brother and watch him mechanically move to inspect shells for imperfections and throw rejects away in a large metal bucket. Even if it meant he had to stay awake far past the time he used to, Mihael didn’t care. The factory wasn’t the apartment, which he was steadily growing to not find as interesting as before. Maybe the new environment was stimulating for the first couple of weeks, but Mihael grew tired of seeing the same stains on the wallpaper, watching Aleksander repeat the same chores every morning, and eating the same bland food at mealtimes.

The factory always had something different happening. Sometimes the supervisor would yell at his underlings that they were too slow, but sometimes he also spoke quietly to tell them that the pace was going well. The machines were never guaranteed to always be functioning right, so that meant a new person - the mechanic, according to Aleksander - showed up to work with everyone else. The only constant in the factory visits was that Mihael stayed glued to Aleksander’s side. It wasn’t safe to run off on his own, much like Mihael wanted to do, and he had to be careful for Aleksander.

If he wasn’t careful, then who would be sleeping next to his brother every night? Mihael couldn’t imagine sleeping without his brother’s warm form next to his own, and he was sure that the same could be said for Aleksander.

****

The day started like many others, save for that all that Aleksander could get out of the sink that morning was a few pitiful drops of water. He sighed heavily while opening up the kitchen cabinet, deciding it wasn’t worth it to continue trying to make much for breakfast. At least he and Mihael had managed to wash up before the water had been cut off.

“Porridge?” Mihael asked from his seat at the table, watching his brother as always.

“I can’t make it this morning. The water went out.” Aleksander surveyed the contents of the cabinet. There wasn’t very much left inside; admittedly, Aleksander had spent just a little bit over the budget for Mihael’s birthday dinner (he couldn’t let him only eat stale crusty bread and sausage for dinner that one special day of the year). He hadn’t been able to buy the basic essentials for food this week. All of last week’s food remnants in the cabinet were half a loaf of the stale bread, a sack of uncooked porridge, a large potato still covered in dirt, and a tin can of precooked lentils. He figured that the lentils and bread would be a good enough meal for them to start off the day with. Mihael wouldn’t protest about eating lentils for the third time this week anyway.

With the small orange beans dumped into either of the two mugs, Aleksander made his way to the table to start eating.

The sudden vibration he felt as the building trembled almost caused him to drop the mugs and spill their precious food. Following after the vibration came a loud boom from the distance, with rapidly succeeding smaller echoes of the same noise. Aleksander’s body stiffened and froze at the familiar sound of artillery shelling. Just as it’d been seeming that the violence had been calming down…From the window’s view, there was a steady funnel of smoke rising from another rooftop in the distance.

Aleksander saw Mihael from the corner of his eye. His expression was not just filled with worry but etched with fear as he covered his eyes with his hands and eyes opened wide and starting to water from the corners.

_No, no._

He couldn’t be scared now.

Aleksander set down the mugs at the table and scooped up Mihael in his arms, cradling his tiny body.

“We’re going to go downstairs now. It’ll be okay,” Aleksander murmured to Mihael. In response, Mihael only buried his head into the crook of Aleksander’s neck. “I promise it won’t be like last time.”

****

Even after the truce and two and a half years’ time, Osijek still seemed like a war zone to Aleksander.

He was still manufacturing bullets for Croatian guns, there were still soldiers stationed at the outskirts of the city’s entrances, buildings still looked as though they had been punched through with bullets over and over again, and there was _still_ shelling of the city. It didn’t seem to matter whether the peace conferences were outlining the limits of what they could and couldn’t do, the Serbs were going to keep hitting Osijek until it became the next Vukovar.

The shelling wasn’t constant like it had been in Vukovar for three months, but that made it all the worse. No one knew when it would happen. Aleksander couldn’t be sure he would walk down the street to buy groceries and come back without hearing the haunting firing boom. He couldn’t be sure that Mihael would be home alone, unharmed and with intact windows by the time he came home from work.

They still lived like they had before; wake up early, porridge for breakfast, cleaning the apartment as best as possible, work, then prayer before bed and short chat before actually falling asleep. Mihael now didn’t need to keep accompanying Aleksander to work. Aleksander had found, per suggestion of one of his coworkers, a kindergarten that was still operating in Osijek. Aleksander now worked the earliest shift he could manage to get - from eight in the morning until seven in the evening - in order to be with Mihael as much as possible when the sun set. On their morning commute, Aleksander walked Mihael from one of the bus’s stops to the low set concrete building painted with brightly colored smiling flowers and animals, and then he set off for the bus stop again. At the end of the school day, Mihael rode the bus and walked himself back into the apartment. As far as this went, it was the easiest way Aleksander had for his brother to be kept safe.

It meant he didn’t get to spend as much time as possible with his brother, but Aleksander had to believe it was the best option. It was better than having an idle child wander around the factory or staying alone in the apartment with the imminent threat of shelling or of being unable to handle an emergency.

Which was why his days off were so valuable.

Usually Aleksander felt too exhausted from six days of work to do much on his days off, but he always made time for Mihael and whatever he wanted. If that meant they would go outside to play in the slush of winter or if it meant Aleksander would settle Mihael on his lap to read from their mother’s Bible, he was going to do it.

It was during a Bible reading session that Mihael asked the question.

Outside was the sound of Christmas drunks, who had been hopping from liquor store to bar almost all evening, and of rain hitting the concrete sidewalk lightly. Mihael was on Aleksander’s lap, with the worn leather Bible in his hands as his older brother read him the account of Christ’s birth. Of course, he already knew the entire story. He had ever since the Christmas _before_ when Aleksander had read the exact same passages to him.

“What happened to Mama and Papa?” It came uncharacteristically quietly from Mihael’s lips and lacked much of the strength his tone of voice always had.

He’d already pieced together that they weren’t around any longer and had probably died, but it wasn’t enough for him. Mihael wanted to know. He wanted to know exactly what had happened, a topic that Aleksander had never been keen on letting Mihael know much about.

Aleksander faltered in his narration, throat clogged for some reason and unable to issue any other words. The question struck him by complete surprise. Mihael was five years old now. He still was similar to the curious two year old Aleksander remembered bringing to the apartment for the first time, but his questions usually were only about things Aleksander felt comfortable giving out the answers to. Mihael seemed to have finally been able to judge the incredible emotion packed behind the questions about family and about the ongoing conflict they lived in and determine that Aleksander was not one for giving the answers to those questions.

“Do you remember when we lived in Vukovar?” Aleksander finally managed, shutting the Bible closed and laying it to the side, on the floor beside the mattress.

“No.”

That was expected. He’d only been not even two years old when it happened. Mihael clambered out from his brother’s long legs to sit facing him.

“Our house got hit by a rocket. We were in the basement.” Aleksander felt the words rolling out of his mouth now, shocked at how easy it was to speak of the event that had changed so much for him. He ran a few fingers through his hair. “They were upstairs to get something for me–”

The scene unfolded in his mind. The house shaking violently above he and Mihael huddled under a blanket in the cold basement. Mihael’s crying and clinging to him as a part of the foundation caved in unto the basement. Choking on the dust and debris particles while carrying a screaming toddler above ground, shouting for his parents. Seeing the torso covered in a singed blouse and wet blood collecting dirt on the exposed and detached limbs. Having to hold back bile in his throat when stepping over a chunk of bloody, raw muscle partially wrapped around bone still. Forcing his brother’s head against his chest as he stood in horror at his entire childhood, his entire life lying in ruins right at his very feet.

“...and then it hit the house, and they were gone,” Aleksander slowly said. His fingers had left his hair now, one of them toying with the rosary around his neck. It was a present from their parents, his last one before they’d been killed.

“What were they like?”

Mihael could tell his brother was uncomfortable, the way his eyes glassed over and the way the color was starting to drain from his face. Maybe this would be a little easier for him to answer.

It took a moment for Aleksander to wane away the memory and replace it with a much happier one.

His mouth was like a waterfall, now spewing out as much as he could think about their parents. How Papa’s beard wasn’t scratchy but wispy and soft and how it tickled his face when they hugged. The way the whole house smelled like on Sunday evenings after church, the air infected with the scent of paprika and roasting pork. Papa taking him fishing on the Danube, the two of them talking while their lines didn’t lure in a single fish, being told at the end of the day trip that he was going to have a younger sibling. Mama balancing Mihael on one hip while she spoke on the phone in heavily accented German with Papa when he was away for a business trip, the way she practiced her German around Papa as much as possible. The pride and beaming smiles on the day he turned fifteen years old. Their selfless ways of taking care of others – whether it was giving away bread they could barely afford to spare or going to retrieve his favorite book to read while in the basement.

Mihael listened to Aleksander with the most attentive stare he’d ever seen on the boy’s face. When Aleksander ran all that he could of stories and small details about their parents, Mihael didn’t press for more. He was satisfied with every bit he’d been told. It was late now, nearly midnight.

“We should get ready for bed.” Aleksander stood from the mattress and stretched out his back.

“Aleks,” Mihael said after the prayers had been said and lights had been turned off. He stared blankly up at the ceiling, which wasn’t completely darkened by the nighttime because of the Christmas lights hanging from the building across the street.

“Mhm?” Aleksander mumbled.

“Thank you.” Mihael paused. “Always.”

****

It always took at least thirty five minutes to get ready for bed. Mihael and Aleksander would clean up the dishes from dinner, make sure the apartment’s door was locked and tightly shut with the cinderblock set in front of it in case the lock was broken again, brush their teeth with the tingly baking soda, and Aleksander would scrub his face with harsh soap to get rid of the dirt from his pores. That took about twenty minutes.

What held them up at bedtime were the prayers. Mihael would feel the words tumbling clumsily out from his mouth as he sat cross legged on the mattress next to his brother, who was already at work reciting the lines with seemingly no effort. Aleksander’s fingertips would roll the beads of his rosary once for every Hail Mary, every single one of them and the following Glory Bes and Our Father. Mihael felt envious almost. Aleksander could do this so easily; he meanwhile fumbled blindly trying to recite the words he had little connection to. Despite his brother’s obvious struggles, Aleksander never once interrupted. He let Mihael fumble and fall, and then get his footing again as he recited the right words.

One night, a particularly blustery March evening following after a day of heavy snowfall, Aleksander didn’t begin the prayers as usual.

“Mihael,” he said, looking to his younger brother. Mihael had already settled on top of the spiral patterned mattress, legs folded neatly. “Take this.”

Aleksander removed the rosary from around his neck.

“But that’s yours,” Mihael insisted. He didn’t extend his palm as Aleksander coaxed him to.

“You need it more than I do.” Aleksander gently grabbed his brother’s wrist, and he turned the small boy’s hand to face upward. The rosary was pooled neatly into the blond boy’s soft palm. “It’ll help you keep track.”

Aleksander cracked a smile to his younger brother, who then returned it. The grin wasn’t the grin he was quite accustomed to seeing on his brother’s face; the widening of the mouth, curving of the corners, split between his lips showing his teeth and a couple of gaps where teeth should be growing into very soon. It wasn’t the smirk of the mischievous little five year old who had just pelted the landlord’s sedan with snowballs; no, it was the grin of the five year old boy feeling utmost gratitude for his brother’s kindness.

“I’ll teach you how to use it for prayer, okay?” Aleksander offered. He reached again for his brother’s hand, placing the pewter cross at the top of the pile of beads. “You remember how to make the sign of the cross, right?”

Enthusiastically, Mihael nodded his head. His bobbed hair bounced in the movement. _Of course_ he did.

“Good. Just do that while holding the cross,” Aleksander instructed. He pulled his own hand back from his brother’s, forming the gesture to start his own prayer so that Mihael could follow along.

Mihael gathered his first three fingers of his right hand together, gripping to the metal cross. Bringing the figure to his forehead, down to his chest, and from his right and left shoulders, Mihael mirrored Aleksander perfectly while murmuring the words he would know the rest of his life, “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

“And then the Apostles Creed.” Aleksander began slowly reciting, knowing that Mihael was probably not going to be able to catch the long block of words at once. Mihael repeated in a murmur the words his brother said, taking care to try and assess what it meant. If he could just remember the meanings, maybe he could also be able to remember what the words were more easily…

“The first bead now, Mihael,” Aleksander continued, “is the Our Father. Do you know it?”

Reluctantly, Mihael swung his head from side to side. He could piece together bits of it while he listened to his brother’s recitations, but could never do it on his own.

“That’s okay.” Aleksander grinned reassuringly to Mihael. “You’re learning, remember?”

“Right.”

Aleksander repeated the same process of slowly speaking the words of the prayer for Mihael to repeat back. He couldn’t let his little brother down. If it meant they had to stay up past eleven that night, and Mihael would have to go to school with a tousled and grumpy attitude that morning, and Aleksander would drudge himself into the factory tomorrow, then Aleksander was going to ensure that Mihael could at least feel partially more comfortable and confident in his prayers.

When it came time for the first Intention, Mihael suddenly fell silent.

“I’m supposed to say it out loud, right?” Mihael asked, looking contemplative. Far too contemplative for a five year old, in Aleksander’s opinion.

“Yeah, of course.” Aleksander ruffled his brother’s blond locks. “It’s okay. Don’t be embarrassed to tell what you want to pray for. I do it, too. Go on.”

Mihael took a deep breath and toyed with the red glass bead in between his fingertips. “In the name of Jesus Christ, I pray that...that my brother gets treated with as much kindness as he gives out.”

An incredibly profound way to express himself. Aleksander knew his kid brother was smart, definitely far above average, but the words he’d just heard probably should’ve come from a much more mature young man. Not a five year old kid. Then again most five year old kids didn’t live in a cramped studio flat that had barely any heating with their older brother while his parents laid in an eternal bed meters underneath the ground.

“And next are the ten Hail Marys,” Aleksander continued on.

Mihael gave his complete attention to his older brother, focusing solely on the sound of his smooth voice seamlessly reciting the words again and again. Mihael followed along just as before, mouthing the syllables as best he could. He ignored the chill of a draft on his bare toes, the car alarm ringing on the street below, the drunks arguing loudly across the hall. No distractions could be afforded. He was going to get this right.

After the Hail Marys, all ten of which Aleksander had stopped to check on his brother to make sure he was following along, Mihael looked Aleksander in the eye.

“Next is the Glory Be,” Mihael stated. His voice didn’t quaver in doubt. Aleksander couldn’t help but grin again. It seemed that the rosary was just what Mihael needed to steady himself and keep track.

“Right.”

They continued on like that. Mihael would thumb individual red beads of the rosary to keep track while Aleksander said the prayers, and then he would repeat the words quietly after. Four more times they did so, going through the remaining four sections of ten beads and single bead sections. After the final Our Father, Mihael felt a tingling sensation in his toes. The end of prayer meant his favorite part of the before bedtime ritual. Maybe he could work on perfecting the rest of his praying tomorrow night…

Aleksander too seemed to feel like rushing slightly through the last prayer, not bothering at this point to recite in the slow manner as before. Mihael knew exactly, almost instinctively, what to do next.

“Amen.” The final one was said not in an echo of his brother, but in unison.

It was 11:59, twenty nine minutes past the beginning of getting ready to sleep. Mihael slipped the rosary around his neck, letting it sit on top of his dark T-shirt. As a gift from his brother, he was always going to keep it securely near his heart. However cheesy it sounded. Mihael laid himself down the bare mattress without unfolding his crossed legs on, rolling over nimbly to the side pushed up against the wall.

Aleksander had gotten up from his kneeling position at the side of the mattress and flicked the light switch to extinguish the dim lighting. Then he pulled the quilt away from its balled up position at the foot of the mattress. He climbed onto the bed also and threw the quilt over the two of them.

“Did you manage alright without me here for dinner? I’m sorry that I had to work late.”

Mihael knew that it nearly being midnight didn’t mean anything to Aleksander. They could never skip the most important part of getting ready for bed.

****

It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult. It had never been _this_ difficult.

“Mihael, you have to go to school,” Aleksander repeated for the countless time that morning. His battered wristwatch displayed the time as being half past nine in the morning. He understood with great compassion that sometimes going to school just wasn’t something everyone wanted to do, but even he had put on a fake smile before leaving and managed an entire day at school. It wasn’t enjoyable, but it had to be done.

Mihael stayed stiffly sitting in the metal chair, arms crossed in defiance as he glared at the wall. This was so strange to Aleksander; Mihael loved going to school, loved learning, and always spoke excitedly about the new activities he’d done after a day of school. Now, he was refusing to even leave his chair, with his bowl of porridge barely touched.

Aleksander heaved a sigh and sat back down at the table. He tried a different approach to the problem. “Why don’t you want to go?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Mihael muttered. He changed where he was glaring at to be the gas range, so he didn’t have to look at Aleksander’s concerned expression. He focused instead on the brown stain right above the range. He could’ve sworn it’d grown in diameter by at least a centimeter or two in the last month.

“I’m not leaving for work until you leave for school, then,” Aleksander settled.

Mihael weighed his options. If Aleksander skipped out on work, then he could surely be fired. There were plenty of people looking for jobs now, and the factory didn’t have to keep workers who refused to show up. He was possibly jeopardizing their future financial stability if he kept this up, and if Aleksander kept true to his word. But then there was the actual issue of going to school today. It’d be another day he didn’t have the patience to deal with. He wasn’t sure how many more comments he could handle about how his hair smelled funny, how his clothes didn’t fit just right, how he just wasn’t like everyone else. Yesterday had been a hard test. He’d almost landed a fist into a kid’s jaw for his sly comment about how his hair looked weird. The only thing stopping him from letting out all the pent up anger and frustration was the thought of what Aleksander would say to him if he came back from work to a note from Mihael’s teacher saying he’d punched another kid.

He didn’t want to come that close to it again.

He snuck a glance at Aleksander’s persistent and stern gaze. Maybe it would be enough to scare him into abiding by what Aleksander wanted, but this time it was pure logic that was making Mihael push himself away from the table and grab his school bag. He wouldn’t let Aleksander know that. It’d be better to let him believe he had unquestioning faith that his older brother was right (which he, admittedly, still had from when he was younger, but that was a secret).

Aleksander offered Mihael a small relieved smile and clapped him on the shoulder while they walked to the door. “Let’s get going.”

***

Mihael, despite his resignation to be going to school that morning, kept a slightly slower pace than Aleksander did as they made their way to the bus stop. Aleksander wasn’t surprised by this. Mihael had a tendency to draw out his sulking whenever he couldn’t do as he wanted, and Aleksander learned that the best way to deal with it was to just let the storm cloud in Mihael’s mind meander off on its own eventually. If he wanted to avoid him for forcing him to go to school today, Aleksander was just fine to let that happen. Mihael would come around to a better mood by the end of the day, after he’d been at school and distracted by the letters and numbers and new playthings.

Eventually, they had to meet up as they approached a busy intersection. They waited side by side in the small gaggle of commuters gathered at the street corner waiting for their signal to cross the street. Aleksander gave Mihael another smile, catching his brother’s eye. Mihael looked away immediately, but then Aleksander felt his hand closest to Mihael being tugged on. Mihael’s small fingers clamped onto Aleksander’s fingers, squeezing them tightly as if to apologize for his behavior earlier.

The crosswalk signal changed, and the cars started slowing down and stopping as the direction of traffic changed. A screeching whistling came next, a sound Aleksander had trained himself to recognize at any time.

They were halfway across the street then. There was no way they’d both make it across in the split second it took to strike. Aleksander pried Mihael’s fingers from his hand and shoved his brother down toward the pavement they’d just left.

Mihael stumbled, wondering what had possessed Aleksander to push him that way.

And then everything was a billowing cloud of smoke and dust and chunks of pavement flying through the air. His body skidded across concrete and slammed violently up against the low lying brick wall of the wooded park they passed every day while walking to the bus stop. Mihael choked on the dust filled air, his lungs burning underneath his crumpled form. Sirens were blaring loudly, making his ears throb like he was standing right next to a church bell being rung.

Mihael didn’t notice what he was doing until he couldn’t muster the strength it took to counter the pain surging through his body. He was midway through dragging his body across the crosswalk, crawling using only his arms and upper body. His sleeves tore as they dug into sharp bits of concrete and asphalt, and his eyes were burning from the heavy smoke surrounding him. As if all energy was suddenly drained from him, he collapsed and his head slammed against the street, eyes able to see the other side of the intersection.

There was a car stopped in the center of it, with a wild track of black tire marks showing how the driver swerved off course as the explosion happened. In hazy vision, Mihael saw several people staggering to their feet and a few of them bleeding from skin punctured by metal and other dark material. In front of the car was a long river of blood, leading straight up to…

Mihael felt his throat close in on him.

It was definitely a body. A body missing both legs, one leg stranded to the far right of the intersection and the other nowhere in sight, slumped over itself limply with its dark blond hair matted with blood and left arm mangled and skinned down to the bone from skidding across the street. Part of the blue work uniform it wore was aflame, burning rapidly over the remainder of the lifeless form.

He didn’t want to believe what he was seeing. There was a scream rising in his throat, but the tissue felt too dry and like it had cracked.

“Are you alright?” A voice asked, but all Mihael could focus on was his brother slumped against the car, dull and void of any life.

He felt strong hands lift him up from the pavement and watched as the stranger carried him away from the scene, away from the smoke and fire. His eyes stayed trained on the spot he knew Aleksander’s body was still laying, and it was only when the person carrying him over their shoulder and laid Mihael’s body onto a brightly colored stretcher that his scream finally was released. All he could see was the smoke filled sky, slowly morphing into the light blue he was used to seeing from his perch at the window.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know how often I will be able to actually update this fic. I've just started college, so I don't have a full grasp on how my writing schedule will be affected by school. I'm hoping it'll be once a week at least.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For reference, this chapter all takes place during the late spring of 1995.

There had once been a time when Mihael wanted anything and everything to do with moving faster than a walking pace. He loved the bus and all of its strange passengers - old men who barely had a full mouth of yellowing teeth, frumpy housewives corralling their gaggle of children to sit onto a single row of bus seats, but the best part of the bus was how it jerked when it left the curb of the road and slowly gathered speed. He’d bounce back in his seat and anticipate every moment of the ride. By the third time he rode the bus home from school, Mihael had memorized every pothole and every crack in the route. Instead of bouncing off his seat when the bus would drive over, Mihael knew the exact moment to brace himself and grip tightly to the underside of the seat. There was no way life could throw something unexpected at him while he was riding the bus.

The feeling of speeding, passing by everyone on the street was something inherently satisfactory that Mihael couldn’t express. He was moving, going somewhere, and it was happening so much faster than for the rest left in the clouds of exhaust fumes on the sidewalk.

He didn’t feel the same way in the ambulance as it sped through downtown, bypassing hundreds of commuters and other drivers alike. Of course, he didn’t have much ability to focus on the vehicle’s velocity.

Mihael couldn’t stop himself. His body was thrashing against his restraint, a soft downy blanket cocooning him. His throat burned and protested, issuing screams and unintelligible words. The burning didn’t seem to hinder his voice. If anything, it reminded Mihael of the smoke settling from what he’d just witnessed, and the vocalization of his agony was only amplified.

His bloodied arms tried to escape from the folds of the blanket, but all the attempts were met with failure. He was too tightly bundled up, almost like how he found himself in the mornings with the quilt tucked around his body in the chill of winter. No one intervened with his struggling or screaming. The young paramedic diverted his eyes from watching Mihael by monitoring the wristwatch he wore, timing the trip’s length.

Arriving at the hospital and parking at the rear of Osijek’s only hospital, the ambulance finally came to a stop. Mihael didn’t. He thrashed with more intensity, banging his head against the metal frame of the stretcher, screaming only growing louder as pain radiated from the crown of his head and spread throughout his whole body.

The paramedic wheeled the stretcher from the back of the ambulance and onto a bumpy concrete path leading to the hospital’s bustling emergency department. Only the staff members present in the waiting room didn’t avert their attention to the screaming child being brought in. It was too often that they saw someone in such distress, and there was already a room full of other civilians injured in the rocket strike. One more meant nothing else.

**

He couldn’t move. The pain had finally nestled fully into his body, not allowing Mihael to even try to leave from his seat on the examination room’s stiffly padded and paper covered table. Every crook and corner of his body was aching. His legs dangled off the edge of the table while he gritted his teeth to stop his eyes from pricking tears. The dark pants and long sleeved T-shirt he’d been wearing were ruined, sitting in a heap in the garbage bin in the room’s corner. They weren’t going to wearable again. There were too many tears and rips running through the seams and fabric from skidding across the pavement to be able to mend them, and the material had been soaked through with blood. The nurse had issued him a stark white hospital gown to change into while she fetched more bandages (the amount of grazing on his body was much more than what she’d expected).

The room was unbearably stuffy and constricted, with the furniture illy placed all along the walls. Mihael felt nausea filling himself as he stared down at the laminated floor tiles, forcing his eyelids wide opened. His knees and shins were still bleeding, mingling in with dirt and small bits of gravel that had been embedded into his skin.

The nurse came back holding a couple rolls of white fibrous bandages and was accompanied by an old man wearing a lab coat with fading stains on the sleeves. Mihael didn’t pick his head up as the two entered, instead he just watched the door crack open and their scuffed shoes shuffle into the already cramped room.

“Could you look up here?” the man was standing right in front of Mihael.

Mihael complied with the man’s request, despite the discomfort in his neck. The man was stooped over slightly, maybe because he had a bad back or maybe in order to be on Mihael’s eye level, and his face was lined with exhaustion. A gentle smile crept on the man’s face, but it seemed too obviously forced by the way his mouth corners were the only moving part of the expression. The nurse handed the man one of rolls of bandages and a damp rag from a basin.

“It looks like you’ve been through quite a lot today,” the man commented. He accepted the damp rag and began wiping Mihael’s bloodied and scraped face, clearing away smears of dried dark red blood and bits of gravel. “What’s your name?”

“Mihael,” he muttered.

“Alright, well, Mihael, we’re going to get you fixed and cleaned up,” the man said. “Then we can send you home. Are your parents able to come get you?”  
The lukewarm rag did nothing to counter the chill Mihael felt running down his body now. No. His parents weren’t able to. Aleksander couldn’t. There was no one left.

His legs started trembling, knobby knees banging against each other. Dread was filling his chest, making it difficult to breathe without focusing on the mechanics of opening his mouth to bring in air.

“No,” Mihael answered in a quiet voice.

“Is there anyone else who could?” The man still continued to wipe grime away from Mihael’s face, lifting up his bangs to get to his forehead.

Mihael shook his head, despite the pain in his neck. A ringing noise started sounding in his ears, mingling with the sound of the nurse and the man speaking in whispers to each other.

“Listen to me, Mihael,” the man said, returning to face Mihael. “This might be hard to talk about, but we need to know so we can help you. Were you with someone when the rocket struck?”

Mihael gulped for a breath of air and felt an awful sensation fill his throat. Breathing still burned. Respond to the man’s question, Mihael nodded. “...brother.”

“Very good,” the man continued. He gave Mihael another mechanical smile. Mihael found no source of comfort in the man’s expression. “Do you know where your brother is?”

Mihael sniffed sharply to stop his nose from dripping. His teeth started to chatter slightly with his words. “He...he died.”

The ringing noise was growing louder in his ears. It was starting to become unbearable and overpowering. Mihael shut his eyes tightly, as if shutting off as much sensation as possible could turn off the sound. Faintly, like he was several feet away, Mihael heard the man talking once more.

“Is it just you and your brother at home?”

Vigorously, Mihael nodded his head and gasped for air. His mouth hung open, locked in place by his lower jaw’s rigidity. He cracked his eyelids open now, feeling the rims of his eyes burn with hot tears.

“Mihael, you’re going to be taken care of.” The man had handed the rag to the nurse and held onto one of the bandage rolls. Taking one of Mihael’s bare arms, which had been wiped clean by the nurse prior, he started to carefully wrap the fabric around the scrapes. “Miss Hera will finish cleaning you up after this. I’ll be going to get someone who can help you.”

After neatly wrapping the material a few times around Mihael’s arm where the worst of the scrapes were, the man ripped the bandage strip from the roll and anchored it in a tight knot. He offered another forced smile to Mihael, handed the roll of bandages to the nurse, and left the room to just Mihael and petite nurse. Mihael still felt nearly paralyzed now, unable to shut his mouth and stop the steady stream of tears straggling down his cheeks. He barely noticed the nurse, Miss Hera as the man called her, continuing the man’s work of cleaning, dressing, and bandaging the scrapes on his skin.

Mihael was left unattended in the room after his limbs had all been bandaged up and stiffened and his face had been padded down with gauze. Miss Hera never returned once she left with the garbage bin full of destroyed clothing and several bloodied wet rags. All he was left with was the growing dread piling in his chest cavity, a dark feeling of utter abandonment.

*

The social worker introduced herself as Miss Ida. She kept referring to him as ‘Mihael _dragi_ ” and had a habit of pursing her thin lips while he spoke to her. He retold as much as the events of the day to Miss Ida as he could, even when he had to choke out words and stop for several moments to catch his breath. During all of those moments of gasping for breath, she patted his shoulder and whispered empty words of comfort and cooings of “Mihael _dragi_ ”.

He didn’t have the strength it took to retort back that he wasn’t her dear, that it made him feel physically sick to hear him being called that by anyone but Aleksander. Even if it hadn’t been something Aleksander actually used to call him (Aleksander prefered to shorten Mihael’s name to Miho, as Mihael liked to shorten his brother’s name to just Aleks), it felt absolutely wrong to be called that by someone like Miss Ida. All he knew was that she worked in social services, smoked often judging by the scent of perfume mixed with tobacco, and she seemed to lack the graces of socially acceptable interactions.

Yet there he was spilling his entire life out to her.

“ _Dragi_ , I’m going to make sure you go somewhere that’ll take good care of you, okay?” Miss Ida said after Mihael had given her all the details of anything he could remember of his life.

Hearing the word brought an acrid feeling in his throat. Just as the woman rose up from her seat beside Mihael on the examination table, Mihael felt the acrid sensation start rising.

“ _Dragi_ , are you okay? Do you need something?”

Mihael gagged for a split second, clutching his sides before keeling over his lap.

On Miss Ida’s scuffed heeled shoes spilled out a stream of stomach acid, smelling faintly foul. Mihael involuntarily hacked, spitting up more of the acid onto the floor tiles. He dared a gaze up at Miss Ida’s face. Her lips had curled in disgust, showing slightly yellowing teeth.

 _Dragi_ didn’t leave her mouth a single more time when she spoke with Mihael after that.

*

The kids didn’t want to be near him. They didn’t include him in their games of football played with a half-deflated basketball or let him flick marbles down the hallways to see whose tiny glass ball could reach the furthest. When sitting in the dining hall, he received nothing but ill contempt expressions of disinterest or disgust as he ate his meals with as much apathy as humanly possible. There was no urge for him to eat other than to conform to what everyone else was doing.

Mihael didn’t blame them. He was intimidating, nearly every limb wrapped partially in bandages and face scraped and rubbed raw. Dark scabs had formed over most of the patches of skin on his face, but they were prone to falling off in his sleep and resulting in a sheet stained with copper blood or cheeks marked with fresh, bright pink skin.

He didn’t try to interact either. Though it wasn’t as if he didn’t yearn for interaction.

All of his waking moments were spent with a swelling, bitter loneliness in his chest. He was alone. Aleksander no longer shared a bed with him, keeping Mihael warm during the night and serving as a comfortable extra pillow sometimes. Now he slept with a thin sheet wrapped loosely around him and flimsy pillow with a stained casing. Aleksander wasn’t there to help him unwrap the bandages to be replaced twice a day, murmuring soft words of comfort while he poured antiseptic on the scrapes that had reopened or the already infected abrasions. It was the matron, a wrinkly old woman who didn’t smile at all and spoke with a raspy voice about how Mihael was going to get smacked if he didn’t sit still long enough or if he made a single peep about the stinging solution she slathered on his wounds. The matron would be the one haphazardly peeling the bandages from his legs and arms and reapplying them either too tightly or too loosely (that depended on whether the swelled knobs of her knuckles were inflamed at the time; the woman’s arthritis, Mihael noted, was a clear indicator of how much work he was going to need spending time readjusting the bandages to prevent his circulation being cut off or bandages from slipping off).

Bed time still included prayer, but it was much more different than with Aleksander. The matron would lead the entire room of kids kneeling by their beds with hands steepled. She prowled the rows of beds waiting to catch someone faltering in their words, someone who wasn’t dignified in their stance, someone who was close to dozing off. After prayer concluded, she would pull kids aside and sternly speak about their faults, berating them down to unfaithfuls, and then finally delivering a kick to their sides and sending them to sleep off the pain of her heels.

Several times Mihael found himself meeting the heel with his body. He fumbled during prayer even worse than before Aleksander gave him the rosary, jumbling his words up and forgetting entire lines. At night he’d curl himself up in a ball covered entirely in the thin sheet, trying to ignore the feeling as the scabs at his knees tore off from being stretched and the bruises aching as he doubled over.

Sometimes he was able to sleep, but more often than not Mihael would be wide eyed awake underneath the covers and unable to even feel an ounce of sleepiness. He was on constant edge, hyper aware of every sound, every shadow moving from behind the sheet. What exactly he was so desperate to pick out from his surroundings wasn’t very clear to Mihael. Nevertheless, he still was plagued with a desire to stay as awake as possible, because _something_ could happen if he were asleep.

If he found himself drifting off to sleep, it was always full of uneasiness and troubling visions of bloodied stumps on bodies and dismembered limbs spraying blood. The ringing in his ear would always be extremely loud when he woke drenched straight through his pajamas in cold sweat.

The ringing followed him almost everywhere. It began to make Mihael’s ears ache and give him pounding headaches. Several times the ringing grew so overwhelming that all he could do was find an isolated place - a niche in the wall, a cleaning supply closet - and curl up hugging his knees and pressing his palms against his ears.

The worst part of it was not the physical pain, but the fact that he was completely alone in a world where no one cared deeply about him. The matron only changed his bandages because it was her job, the orphanage only supplied food because it was required to, and Aleksander was now just cardboard box filled with gray ash inturned at a mausoleum he’d never seen.

It didn’t matter whether anyone attempted to reach out to him, to ask if he would like to play, or if he would like to talk. Mihael was sure the only way he could be cured of the loneliness was if that day could be lived again, if he could only have just sucked up his pride and did what he was supposed to have done.

So he shoved away anything and everything. He didn’t bother interacting. Nothing would change even if he tried. He would just have to do this alone from now on.

**

The incident began with one of the older kids. Mihael still kept to himself as much as possible; the scabs had started to disappear, leaving new skin to replace the old, and letting him look less like a kid who’d flew too far off the swingset and skidded across and face planted on the concrete of the playground (that’s what some of the other kids would suggest as to how Mihael had gotten scraped up so badly. It seemed no one wanted to acknowledge what was really going on outside the institution’s walls) and more like a kid who was all around miserably covered in smooth and shiny healing skin and in desperate need of a haircut.

Mihael was sitting idly on the edge of his metal framed bed, concentrating on trying to block out the sounds of the other kids from the rest of the building. He didn’t need a reminder that some of them were happy enough as they were, not worrying, not caring, not struggling at all. The ringing in his ear was welcome at this time. It let him focus on what really was happening, what he was responsible for.

No matter how much he begged for the noise to flood his ears, Mihael wasn’t able to will it as loud as he wanted, no _needed_ , it to be. Every growing second was getting harder and harder for him to keep his concentration on the blank floor slabs and the dull gray of the walls. The sound of laughter throughout the thin walls of the rooms, kids’ feet pounding against stairs and down the hallway, the cheerful screams of excitement were all too much. It was too loud, too obnoxious, too much.

He was on his feet, moving towards the closest source of the noise he could find. A few older kids were in the hallway, shooting brightly colored marbles across the floor, laughing and exclaiming in victory when they managed to get a marble to the end of the hallway and colliding against the wall. Mihael seethed at this. There was no respect for others in this place. When he wasn’t being ignored, he was always being triggered off to be in an awful temper.

“Be quiet.” He stuck his head out from the sleeping chamber’s door frame, giving a glare to the huddle of boys at the end of the hallway.

“How come?” One of them retorted, rising up. “What are you so angry about?”

“It’s too loud.”

“It’s never bothered you before.” The boy approached Mihael, standing about a head taller than him. His dark eyes gave off an air of confidence that was undoubtedly authentic.

_He thinks he’s above me._

Mihael wanted nothing more than to explain that there was only a certain limit to his tolerance, but he couldn't articulate the right words coherently.

His fist collided with the boy’s chin before he could comprehend what he was doing. Mihael stood back in his stance, fist still held up in the air and balled. The other boy stumbled back in surprise, falling back against the wall. His group of friends quickly surrounded their fallen comrade, shooting angry glares at Mihael. Mihael was even more shocked by his own action than the other boy. His arm started to tremble minisculely, staying locked at the elbows and refusing to return to Mihael’s side.

He’d just hit someone.

What was he now?

“Be quiet.” Mihael muttered, repeating himself. His voice remained calm and steady somehow.

The others watched him, the aggravator, with a mingling of anger and fear in their wide eyes.

It wasn’t the answer he’d ever wanted. At least he didn’t have to deal with Aleksander reacting to his act of violence. A dead person could only do much other than decompose, and Aleksander’s ashes couldn’t even do so.

The reprimanding he received from the matron didn’t do anything but entice him to continue. The more he got kicked by her heel, the more bruises he found on his legs, and the more shouting she gave him only made it feel much more rewarding. He started to enjoy the feeling of his fist making contact with another person’s skin. It meant he would get hurt later, like he did deserve in the end. And none of it meant that someone was doing it because they had to.

Violence wasn’t required for anyone.

**

It was after twelve kids had claimed to have been hit by Mihael that he ended up in the office of the orphanage director. One of the matrons, a young woman this time who spoke in slightly off accent, had extracted him from class that morning under the premise of the director wanting to speak with him. Mihael was certain that meant he was about to receive the biggest, the worst, and the most painful punishment that could possibly be dealt to him. The director had complete authority over everyone; he could command matrons to act well when there was an inspection by the Red Cross, and his very presence in a room could silence every child in the orphanage. He was tall and stern, gray haired and mustached to prove evidence of his long experiences in life.

And he was definitely going to be giving Mihael what he deserved.

The office was what Mihael expected it to be like. Cheaply furnished with mismatched woods, crowded into a room barely larger than a storage closet. It wasn’t fitting for a man of so much authority to be forced to inhabit such a tiny space. Two wooden chairs sat before a dark colored wooden desk, behind which the director was seated. His hands rested on top of an array of paperwork scattered across the desk, and he motioned for Mihael to come closer.

“Mihael, sit down.”

Mihael hesitated, staying glued to the wall. He wasn’t afraid of being hit at all. He was afraid of not knowing what was to happen, and this scenario of being even vaguely politely invited to sit at the desk was definitely not in his idea of what was to happen in this sort of situation. Wasn’t he here because he’d been needlessly punching other kids? Was politeness the right way to deal with this kind of thing?

The matron nudged Mihael at the elbow. She nodded towards one of the chairs. It was probably meant to be comforting in a way, but the act only confused and unsettled Mihael even more.

Regardless, he took the hint and settled onto the chair, sitting stiffly against the hard wooden back. He kept his feet still from swinging, maintaining near perfect posture.

“Mihael, do you know why you’re here with me today?” the director began. He clasped his hands together and scooted his own wooden chair closer to the desk and to Mihael. Up close, Mihael could see that the lenses of his glasses were smudged, and his mustache had more white hairs than grays.

“Yes.” Mihael paused. “Sir.”

“Good, at least that is taken care of.” The director sighed with a heaviness that only those who sigh often had. “Is there a reason why you’re hitting other children here?”

Mihael didn’t answer. He didn’t really have an answer, anyway. At first it was because he just wanted that boy to be quiet, but now it’d evolved into a complexity. He did it to be punished. He did it to shut people up. He did it just because he had two fists very capable of planting force into another person’s body.

“You can tell me,” the director coaxed. “I won’t get upset with you.”

There wasn’t an answer still. Mihael fidgeted in the seat, his fingers unable to stay perfectly still any longer. The director tried several more times to make Mihael confess his motives, but Mihael kept his mouth shut and wouldn’t say a word.

“Miss Kosar,” the director nodded towards the matron standing in the corner of the cramped office, “has been very concerned about you, Mihael. She’s convinced us that you might need to see a doctor.”

“I’m not sick.”

“Sometimes you have to get a check up at the doctor, right?” the director prodded. “This will be just fine, just to make sure you are doing okay.”

“Fine.” It was with resignation that Mihael said it.

**

A trip to a doctor was never something Mihael had ever been able to experience. There wasn’t enough money for walk-in clinics and definitely not for specialist pediatric care with the measly pay Aleksander had made at the factory. The closest to a doctor Mihael had been taken to before his trip to the hospital was one of the older ladies who still occupied an apartment down the hall from them (eventually, most of the residents of their apartment complex had deserted the building if possible. What was left of the population were people who had nowhere else to flee to or were too stubborn to uproot). The old woman would feel his forehead with the back of her wrinkly hand, determined whether or not he had a fever, listened to him cough a couple of times, and gave Aleksander a plastic packet of tea leaves mixed with some unknown other plant matters in exchange for several worn out bills and dirty coins.

The doctor Miss Kosar accompanied Mihael to was nothing like what he had seen at the hospital or during his visits with the elderly woman. The office was in its own low set building, with wide windows and a glass door showing the reception room of the facility. The windows had smudges and handprints on the glass surfaces, which had previously been covered by heavy curtains now pulled off the side. The environment had grown much more peaceful recently. The rocket strike months ago was the only event suggesting that the war was still straggling on. Shelling in Osijek had ceased completely, leaving most residents and businesses at ease to leave their windows uncovered.

The reception room was lit by the wide windows, not needing much use for the hanging ceiling lights. Mihael settled himself onto a plastic folding chair beside a small end table laden with magazines, watching as a few other children in the room were playing together with a set of brightly colored wooden blocks. He stared at the walls decorated with posters with cheerful sayings of encouragement and self confidence. The entire room was brightly colored; the chairs were varying shades of red, green, and blue set in rows overlooking a play area sectioned off by small bookshelves. The walls were painted soft blue, matching well with an oak flooring. A large desk was at the edge of the room, where a couple of secretaries sat typing away on keyboards attached to large, clunky computer monitors and surrounded by papers and manila folders.

Miss Kosar returned to sit beside Mihael after briefly speaking with one of the secretaries. She held onto a beaten clipboard with several sheets of paperwork clamped to it. Mihael focused then as Miss Kosar filled out the forms with information about himself, as if she was aware of everything there possibly was to know about him. It reminded him vaguely of Miss Ida, but that was washed away from his thoughts when Miss Kosar leaned over to ask Mihael to clarify the information given. He felt the young lady’s eyes on him as he scanned the entries on the form, scouring for anything that would be incorrect. Everything Miss Kosar had written checked out as correct, from his date of birth (the 13th of December, 1989) right to down to his supposed reason for the visit (“aggressive and violent behavior for no specified reason, history of trauma”). With some reluctance, Mihael handed the clipboard back to Miss Kosar. She looked to him with some sort of curiosity, like she had been sure he couldn’t have been able to the simple task of reading through the forms on his own.

After she returned the completed paperwork and clipboard back to the secretary, Miss Kosar approached Mihael slowly and sat back down beside him. Mihael resumed his monitoring of the children playing with blocks. One of the boys playing was bickering with a younger girl, probably his sister, that he wanted to build a tower and not a castle.

“Mihael, do you want to play with something?” Miss Kosar asked quietly. Such a public area was not the place for full fledged conversations in regular voice tones.

“No.” Mihael’s eyes didn’t stray from the two arguing kids. A third kid, a younger boy, had interrupted and was trying to suggest that they build a castle with towers.

“Are you sure?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Mihael agitated. He narrowed his eyes, refusing to change his sights.

Miss Kosar left it at that for some time, before returning again to it. She reached over to the end table and grabbed one of the magazines from the stack. Its cover had an image of a brightly feathered bird, with the title of “Cool Birds of the Rainforest”. It was an outdated issue of a children’s magazine, the date printed on the bottom right corner reading as August 1993. She offered it to Mihael, whose attention was finally taken off the unfolding argument of the kids playing with the blocks.

“Do you like to read?” Miss Kosar prompted, placing the magazine onto Mihael’s lap. The pages had lost the glossy look to them from its old age.

Mihael didn’t answer. He was staring down at the cover of the magazine. It would almost be an insult to his reading ability to even try reading the thing. He was used to reading from the Bible and the newspapers, not magazines with overly simplified words and content meant specifically for someone his age. To test if it really was not worth reading, Mihael flipped through the pages (some of them were ripped, others had been repaired shoddily with clear tape) and found that most of the magazine was composed of overly large photographs taking up most of the expanse of pages and words printed in overly large, rounded typeface. The captions actually hurt his head to read because of their simplicity.

_The **macaw** is from South America. It has a long tail and likes to eat fruit and nuts. They look for food together with their other macaw friends._

Mihael rose up and threw the magazine back onto the end table. Reading was something he enjoyed. It wasn’t supposed to be _easy_.

He had turned his heel to go back to his seat when he spotted from the corner of his eye another magazine laying underneath the children’s one. Its lack of color caught his attention, standing out from the other magazines around by looking bland and uninviting. Mihael removed it from the pile of magazines and returned back to his seat. This magazine featured a grayish blue sky on the cover and had several titles and subtitles addressing subjects of the current state of Yugoslavia and the recent advances made by the Croatian army.

Maybe reading for a little while wasn’t going to be such a bad idea.

Mihael eagerly took in all the words he could from the magazine and its articles. He didn’t take notice of the watching eyes of Miss Kosar, her pensive gaze contemplating what he was doing. He didn’t care, to put it simply. Finally he’d found something that was at least able to pique his interest. News like this was something he’d been starved of. The orphanage did its very best to ensure no one got hold of information on the war. It was probably along the premise that talking about the war would be triggering for the children, but Mihael never saw the point in it. He was already where he was. It wouldn’t kill him to see and hear what he’d already become accustomed to.

He sped through the articles, taking in as many of the details and commentaries as possible. For the first time in weeks, he felt some sort of positive emotion surging through him. It wasn’t the kind of satisfaction that he felt getting the punishment he felt he deserved or the tingling rush of adrenaline when his fist made contact with someone’s chin or nose. Excitement was the best word to describe it as.

There were talks of peace negotiations in the coming months, Croatia had retaken the land occupied by the Serbs through military operations, and the efforts of the Serbian side were starting to die down. The end was very, very close.

The feverish excitement lasted until Mihael came upon an article discussing RPG strikes. Suddenly all of the excitement had evaporated and was replaced with a monstrous feeling of anxiety and dread pooling in his stomach. The sight of blood dragged across pavement and leading to the dead body of Aleksander swam in front of him, blending in with the text of the magazine article.

“Mihael.”

Mihael had to tear his eyes off of the magazine’s pages to look towards the source of his name being called. From beside the reception desk was a short statured older man whose brown hair was steadily graying and balding. He was clutching the same clipboard that had the filled out paperwork clipped to it. Miss Kosar stood up before Mihael did, ushering Mihael to stand up as well. Mihael tossed the magazine back onto the end table, letting it carelessly land closer to the edge of the table than on top of the stack of magazines.

The man led Mihael and Miss Kosar down a dimly lit hallway off the left side of the reception room and to a single office a few doors down the hall. The office was toned down in comparison to the reception room, painted in dark brown and also dimly lit. A few paintings hung on the walls, some of which had the childish trademark of bright colors and abstract figures and depictions. There wasn’t a desk in the office. A wide coffee table was in between a worn leather couch and a matching leather armchair. A few puzzle toys and a small basket holding wrapped yogurt candies sat in the middle of the coffee table. There was nothing in the room that Mihael could associate with a doctor’s office.

Moving on a sort of autopilot, Mihael took a seat on the sofa beside Miss Kosar. He was still shaken up by the sudden flash to Aleksander’s body, and didn’t know how to throw off the anxiety coursing through his body without dealing out punches (something in the back of Mihael’s mind told him it wouldn’t be advisable to start hitting anyone in this situation, and he decided to listen to his intuition). The man took his seat at the armchair, setting down the clipboard on the table and extending his hand to Miss Kosar.

“I’m Teodor Vlasic,” he introduced himself. “You can call me Teodor.”

Miss Kosar accepted his handshake and introduced herself as a matron from Mihael’s orphanage. After Miss Kosar’s introduction, Teodor addressed Mihael with a kind smile and a wave.

“And you’re Mihael, right?” he asked.

Mihael nodded.

“Well, where should we start, Mihael?” Teodor picked the clipboard up again and began scanning the content over. “Is there something you want me to know?”

*

There was quite a lot of information that Mihael divulged to Teodor. Something about the dim lighting and calm demeanor of the man made it so much easier to speak freely. He told him everything he could; about the nightmares, the ringing in his ears, how he wanted to be punished, how he felt nothing but loneliness cloaking himself. Miss Kosar sat quietly throughout all of this, contemplating Mihael and his way with words and his mannerisms.  
It was like she was watching someone older than the five year old boy beside her.

The conversation turned to the subject of school when Miss Kosar decided to speak again.

“I think Mihael is very smart,” she commented, glancing to the boy. She remembered the couple of instances when she’d been assigned duty to help one of the teachers with grading and checking over students’ work, and how Mihael’s work had been the only one without a single error. That, combined with his reading of the news magazine earlier and his general way of presenting and expressing himself was enough to convince her so.

“Ah.” Teodor addressed Mihael again. “Mihael, do you think that you’re smart?”

Mihael’s eyes shied away from Teodor, wandering away to stare at one of the paintings on the wall. It was one of the paintings obviously not completed by a child, a realistic watercolor of a pond in soft hues. “I don’t know.”

“I think he could do with being challenged more academically,” Miss Kosar continued. “Maybe he could feel better if that happened, or if he could go to classes with kids more equal to his abilities.”

“Mihael, what do you think about that?” Teodor asked.

Absently, Mihael shrugged. He seemed to have lost some of the interest in the conversation.

“If Mihael had his intelligence tested, do you think he might be able to attend a school better suited for him?” Miss Kosar felt that she was on to something.

“That’s not what Mihael is here for,” Teodor said sternly. “The orphanage isn’t paying me to administer an intelligence test. He’s here for an assessment of his mental health.”

“But, sir, I think it might be something worthwhile,” Miss Kosar protested. “It won’t do any good for such a bright kid to be held back by the orphanage’s school. It could help him go somewhere better.”

“That might be so, but the orphanage is not paying for an intelligence test.”

“I want to do it.”

Mihael had stopped his staring at the painting and was leaning forward into the conversation. Something in his eyes had changed, like he was suddenly much more aware of what was going on around him. Miss Kosar reached for her purse sitting at her feet.

“I’ll pay for it,” she said, pulling out her checkbook and a pen. From the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of a smug look on Mihael’s face.

It had disappeared by the time Miss Kosar had the opportunity to get a full view of Mihael’s face, but the significance was not lost to her. It was the first time she’d ever seen him  
come anywhere near smiling.

*

Teodor was used to pulling late nights at the office and even later nights wide awake studying files from his clients and reading through academic journals. He couldn’t remember the last time he had stayed up _this_ late, though.

It was almost 2:45 in the morning. He was on his third cup of hot tea for the night, which had now grown cold while Teodor read again over his calculations and information recorded from the testing session. Over and over he checked to ensure that everything he had written down and calculated was correct.

It wasn’t often for anyone to come across results like Mihael’s for the intelligence test he’d administered.

Jerking him from his thoughts, the phone started to shrilly ring. Teodor traded the sheaf of papers he’d been holding for the telephone receiver.

“I’ve been waiting almost all night for you to call me back.” Teodor skipped the standard greetings. There was only one person who would be calling him so late at night.

“I have a busy job; you should know that,” the man on the other line responded. He chuckled.

“I know.” Teodor paused. “Anyway, I have something you might be interested in.”.

“What is it?”

“I saw a kid today, Quillish. He was an awful lot like the kind your institution takes care of.”

“There’s a lot of different kinds of children that the House takes in,” the man, Quillish, said. “You mean that this child is very intelligent, don’t you?”

“Yes, that’s what I meant.” Teodor fumbled to grab the papers he’d set down. “I’ve never seen anyone his age score so well on the exam before.”

Quillish was silent for another few moments. Teodor could very well imagine the man setting down his own cup of hot tea and the way he shut his eyes when he was contemplating something. He’d certainly seen him in person enough times to remember it exactly.

“This child, he’s an orphan, correct?”

“I wouldn’t be telling you about him if he wasn’t. I know your policy.”

“I’ll send someone soon to speak with the head of where he’s currently living.”

“Alright. Would you like a fax of his results?”

“Yes, that would be great.” Quillish paused again. “Oh, and Teodor, it’s good to speak with you again. I appreciate it.”

“Of course.”

“Now, tell me a little more about this child. I’m curious.”

Cursing the time difference between them, Teodor stifled a yawn behind a balled fist. Now this was going to take some time to explain to the amount of detail that Quillish would be wanting.


	4. Chapter 4

Something about the fact that he was able to be judged for himself was possibly what Mihael needed most. He was starting to have conflicted feelings. Part of his mind wanted nothing more than for him to be hurt. It was his fault for where he was. At the same time, another part of him was sick of the pain and of the bitter guilt that overtook him in the form of loneliness and anger. That part wanted to escape. It desperately searched for a reason to let itself become reality, to let himself stop suffering because he _wasn’t_ the bad person he was certain he was.

Listening to Miss Kosar speak about his intelligence was enough to momentarily inspire him. If he really did intend to let himself feel better, maybe he did have to be shown the evidence that he was intelligent.

*

Being called down to the director’s office once more was something Mihael had been expecting. It’d been five days since the visit to see Teodor, and he’d already began again and punched another boy on the second day since the visit. Miss Kosar, whom he had been occasionally acknowledging when he happened to run into her by giving her a quick look in the eyes, stuck her head into the boys’ dormitory that morning and called his name. Of the small amount of other boys still in the dormitory, either reading on their brass beds or chatting quietly with each other, almost all of them directed their attention to Mihael. A couple of them watched intently as he jumped off his bed to exit the room, most likely about to turn back and redirect their conversation to what would happen to him or the reason behind him being suddenly pulled out for some sort of discipline.

Miss Kosar again accompanied him to the director’s office, leading him down the dull halls and a flight of stairs to the ground floor. She offered Mihael a quiet good morning some way along their short trip, but Mihael didn’t verbally acknowledge it. He’d been about to begin rereading the magazine from Teodor’s office; on his way out from the reception room, Mihael managed to sneak away from Miss Kosar’s side for a few moments to stash the magazine behind his back to take with him. The magazine had been enough to make him feel remotely well for some time, and Mihael didn’t want to lose that opportunity again; besides, he hadn’t even finished reading the entire thing. Since then, he’d read and reread nearly every article, save for the discussion of RPG strikes. Mihael had torn out the five pages the article had been printed on, disregarding the fact that other articles’ contents were also being torn out, and tossed them in the trash. The magazine was already starting to wear out because of Mihael. From the force that he’d ripped the RPG article out, one of the staples binding the pages had been dislodged, resulting in lopsided pages, and a couple of pages had been accidentally crumpled from when Mihael had stuffed it hastily underneath his pillow when it was time for bedtime prayers.

Needless to say, though, Mihael had grown quite attached to the fine printed pages and giant spreads of maps and images of soldiers. He was more than a little irritated to be pulled away from the only thing he’d actually found enjoyable - that didn’t involve hurting someone else - in a very long time.

And he definitely didn’t need a lecture about his behavior. Or rather, he didn’t _want_ to sit through a lecture.

He settled himself into the wooden chair before the director’s desk, watching the older man. He seemed stiff in his movements as he adjusted his glasses and slightly on edge, like he was uncertain about something. The director waved to Miss Kosar, indicating for her to leave the room. Mihael began to feel a growing nervous pit in his stomach. Miss Kosar so far had been the only person he had actually felt was in favor of him at the orphanage, despite the violence and general avoidant behavior he’d had. Something about her presence leaving him alone with such an authoritative figure like the director was slightly unsettling.

“Mihael, someone is coming to see you,” the director began. Sternly, he looked down at Mihael from over the rims of his glasses.

It was utter confusion, not much unlike the kind that overcame him the first time he set foot in this very office, that took over Mihael’s irritability. There was no one that Mihael could think of who would actually be coming to see him at the orphanage; as far as he knew, both his sets of grandparents were dead, neither his father nor mother had had any siblings, and there hadn’t been any close family friends for them to speak of.

“Who is it?” Mihael asked. He didn’t let his confusion show through in his voice, controlling its tone to remain neutral. It was a habit he’d begun developing since the first day of his stay at the orphanage. No one bothered to ask if you were alright if you seemed so.

“Her name is Petra. She’s from a school of sort.”

The gears clicked in Mihael’s mind. Teodor really had been serious about sharing the results to schools if they were significant. Mihael felt a fluttering sensation in his stomach. Possibly, just maybe, he was about to be leaving the drab and dull confines of the orphanage. The test results also came to mind; he’d scored well enough definitely to garner some sort of attention to the stiff and stuffy higher ups on the boards of some sort of prestigious school who didn’t have the decency to send anyone but a representative to come see him. That was certainly much more than he’d anticipated.

As exciting as the prospect of being at least freed from the dusty orphanage classroom, sharing a desk meant for two children with 4 children, was, Mihael could sense that familiar feeling of dread surging up again. No matter what way the situation could be assessed from, there was still the overhanging reason of why he was in it to begin with. Mihael was utterly alone in this world. Going to another school couldn’t bring his brother back or right the wrongs he had made. The last months of his life had been filled with with the most amount of unforeseen sharp turns and curves thrown at him, and here was another one being thrown right at him with minimal warning.

“Do you know why she might be coming -”

There was a sharp knock on the door behind him. He twisted around to watch as the door swung open, being held by Miss Kosar for a rather tall woman dressed in a dark business suit. She clutched a leather bound briefcase in one hand, and her ashen brown hair was neatly neatly pinned up in a tight bun.

“Mr. Lovric, it’s nice to meet you in person.” The woman approached the director’s desk, shuffling in between the two chairs before it and extended her hand for a handshake.

“Yes...Ms. Petra, it’s good to see you also,” the director grumbled, reaching to reciprocate the handshake over stacks of papers strewn across his desk.  
Mihael was slightly unsure about what the director had to be in such an unwelcoming mood, but then he snuck a glance at Miss Kosar. The young woman was standing rigidly at the door frame, watching the director but never attempting eye contact. The director, too, seemed to be avoiding anything but the bare minimum of interaction with Miss Kosar. It was almost like he was cross with her; when he looked to see whether she was still standing at the doorway, he knitted his eyebrows together and gave her a dismissive jerk of the head, indicating for her to leave.

“And you’re Mihael, aren’t you?” She spoke with an accent that Mihael couldn’t quite place. Underneath the accent, he could tell there was a lingering native tone to the language, but it was faded like she’d been displaced for a long time. “My name is Petra.”

Petra turned to face towards Mihael, offering him a handshake as well. He reluctantly abided, letting his hand be briefly taken by the woman. She then took the chair beside Mihael, setting her briefcase down to lean against the wooden leg of the chair.

“Mihael, it’s good to meet you,” Petra said, giving him a look straight into his eyes. “I have something important to talk with about you.”

Mihael nodded slowly in response, watching Petra’s movements. She leaned down to grab her briefcase again and set it down on her lap while she opened it. Extracting several sheafs of paper, she shuffled the sheets to be in a certain order and snapped the briefcase closed. Briefly her dark eyes skimmed over the type printed on the sheets before placing the entire sheaf onto the director’s desk and pushing it towards the man.

“Do you remember the test you took with Mr. Teodor?” Petra asked, eyes now focused back on Mihael. Other than the handshake with the director, she had been expertly ignoring the older man and his throat clearings and irritable ear scratching.

“Yes.” So this really was about it.

“I work at a school that is interested in having you attend it,” Petra said. She was speaking steadily and confidently, like it had been her life’s purpose to convince small children to attending a school they had likely never heard of before. “The heads of the school are very impressed with your score on the test Mr. Teodor gave you.”

She nodded towards the stack of papers she had placed on the director’s desk. The director glanced down at the papers, skeptically. The hint that Petra gave didn’t seem to slip past him, though, and the director hastily grabbed the papers and began looking over their contents.

Mihael remained silent and only gave Petra a nod of acknowledgement. He wasn’t entirely sure how he was supposed to react in this kind of situation. He remembered being told by Aleksander to always accept a compliment with a word of thanks, but the ones who had called his scores and apparent intelligence weren’t present. A brief smug smile, however, was allowed to slip onto his lips.

“The school is in England.” Petra unclamped the metal clasp keeping her briefcase closed and pulled out a rectangular photograph. She handed it to Mihael.

It felt like a just recently developed photograph, with crisp, sharp corners and a stiff rigidity. The actual image of the photograph was brightly colored and focused on a large pale stone building. Large paned windows were at the front of the building’s facade, which met with an expansive well trimmed green lawn. The building was two stories high, but a circular tower was also present, rising above the gabled roofs for another two stories. Lush, towering green oak trees surrounded the ends of what Mihael could see of the lawn. A large wooden cross was perched on the frontmost of the building’s gabled roofs. He rubbed the pads of his fingers against the photograph. It was glossy and provided a smooth glide across the image for his fingers. Definitely a newly developed photo.

“It’s a school for gifted children, but more specifically for gifted orphans,” Petra continued. She was now, for the first time, looking at the director, squarely in the eyes. “We think that Mihael could excel at Wammy’s House.”

The director and Petra were engaged in straight eye contact, unblinking. The older man was contemplative, eyeing Petra with a sort of curious uncertainty. Mihael watched with earnesty and slight apprehension as the two began a discussion that quickly elevated into a debate.

“Your school is in England. We’re in Croatia,” the director said. He replaced his curiosity with a skeptical expression, cocking his eyebrows up.

“Well, obviously, Mihael won’t remain in Croatia,” Petra said evenly. “He’ll be living in England at the school.”

“But who will be paying for this?” the director questioned. His upper lip twitched, ruffling his mustache. “My institution does _not _have the money to pay for expensive tuition just to send one particular child to a school. We won’t even have the resources to change custody.”__

__Petra pursed her red lips in thoughts. The change in expression did nothing to alter the confidence she exuded._ _

__“Could we excuse Mihael?” she asked suddenly, gesturing to Mihael. “I don’t think he will enjoy listening to us discussing the logistics of this arrangement.”_ _

__The director glanced to Mihael and nodded his head. “Mihael, please leave.”_ _

__Quickly, Mihael stuffed the photograph in his pocket and jumped down from the chair (his legs weren’t yet long enough for his feet to reach the floor) and vacated the office. The hallway was blissfully empty and silent, a straggling toddler just turning the corner to go somewhere else in the building. Feeling relief for deserted hallway, Mihael slumped against the wall of the director’s office to cross his legs on the battered wood flooring. He was directly beside the door he’d just left, and if the silence remained, he would probably be able to hear the rest of Petra and the director’s conversation. Besides, he had never been told whether he was to stick around nearby or leave for the dormitory and come back later._ _

__The voices were muffled and mainly unintelligible - Petra’s because of her accent, and the director’s because of his far proximity from the door. Mihael strained himself to hone in on the conversation, but even the skills he’d developed to listen against the ringing in his ears couldn’t help him much. Still, he didn’t stop trying to listen in on their voices. He scooted himself as close as possible to the doorframe, not wanting to be unknowingly slammed with the door if either of them moved to open it._ _

__Petra’s voice was doing most of the talking. Argumentative and poised, she rebutted back to any comments coming from the director and replied soundly and quickly with an answer to any questions. There was an accusatory outburst from the director once, but swiftly Petra seemed to shut him down._ _

__Mihael could only imagine what sort of subjects they were discussing. He heard the phrases “this institution” thrown around quite a lot, but that was about all of what he could pick out from the debate. Once he’d been listening for several minutes, the ringing started to sound faintly in his ears, making the task at hand even more difficult. He groaned frustration as the familiar aching in his ears followed suit and threw his head back against the wall. It was a stupid move on his part; banging his head against the wall did nothing to benefit the aching he felt._ _

__Several more minutes later brought the apparent end of the conversation. The office door swung open, which Mihael reacted to by jumping straight up. Petra was in the doorway, and she gestured to Mihael to come back into the room. He did so, retaking his seat from earlier. The director seemed tense, hands clasped far too stiffly for him to look anywhere near a relaxed state of mind. His eyes followed Mihael as he came back to his chair._ _

__“Sorry about that, Mihael,” Petra said. She retook her own seat. “We had to discuss some things, but we were able to work it out.”_ _

__She clasped her hands together at her knees, one leg crossed over the other. “Now we just need to hear what you think. Would you like to come to Wammy’s House?”  
He didn’t even consider his response. Images of playing with an actual soccer ball, kicking it around with faceless children who would laugh with him, a place where the grass was what was being kicked up by the soles of his shoes and not dry dirt, were flashing through his mind._ _

__“Yes.”_ _

____

**

There wasn’t a comparable time in which Mihael had felt just so many pure, raw emotions at once. He was leaving the orphanage, leaving Croatia, and leaving behind everything he could call familiar. It was exciting at some points. He could barely contain his energy at time; twice during the week before his departure, he was called out in class to stop bouncing his feet and to sit still. During meal times, he felt an actual desire to eat because of hunger. The desire to fit in with the other kids eating with hardly a problem was replaced with pangs in his stomach that were only satisfied with eating. He didn’t stir around his potatoes across the plate, didn’t slowly grind his cut of pork between his teeth. Almost every plate he ate off of that week was completely cleared of all evidence food had been served on it; there was barely even a crumb or lingering remain of sauce. Instead of keeping to the familiar areas of the dormitories, dining hall, and classroom, Mihael sought out places he’d never set foot in before. Outside the kitchens, he sat leaned against the wall and listened to the cooks chatter away over the sounds of fans running and meat being pounded. He sat on the back steps of the building in the afternoon, watching the other children play their makeshift soccer games with the partially deflated basketball. He watched the clouds of dirt rise up as the other kids kicked and scrambled for the ball, tearing up the already dying grass.

Other times, it was terrifying. His mind froze in thought, unable to imagine anything but the gripping realization that he was leaving home and leaving home for good. The orphanage definitely had not been his “home”, but by leaving behind Croatia, Mihael was leaving behind all he had left of a home. Aleksander and his parents were buried here. The tiny one room apartment in Osijek was here. The weight of that realization only grew with more intensity as he began to let his imagination run wild. He didn’t speak English. What if Wammy’s House was really a scam? What if it wasn’t as Petra had described it? What if it was worse than where he was now?

The fear crushed his chest and ran his high spirits to the ground. It forced Mihael awake at night, staring wide eyed at the underside of his sheet. His mind couldn’t settle down. The ringing noise grew louder when fear possessed him, like fear itself had grown arms and sentience and was drilling right through his ear drums. Curled up in a ball underneath the sheet and trembling as sweat coated his body, Mihael barely slept that entire week.

And a few times anger surfaced in him.

Why was he so scared? Leaving and changing the direction of his life in what would have been a much more positive road was not supposed to leave him feeling so _bad_.

He deserved it. Petra had told him that. He deserved the opportunity he was getting, because he was a bright child who had suffered.

The anger would spiral into being angered by the very fact that he was angry. It was some uncontrollable beast locked inside his mind that played his muscles to contort his face into a sulking frown or to make him urgently and repetitively flex his fingers in a way to fight off the urge to slam his fist into the nearest object or person. He’d been able to finally suppress that urge to some extent when Petra outlined the requirements and expectation for students at Wammy’s House.

There was no fighting, no violence, and definitely no harm done to either another student or himself. She never specified what would have happened to him if he were to break any of the behavioral standards, but he could figure based on previous experience that it wouldn’t rewarded with knowing smile and soft reprimanding.

It was the anger he was feeling while stuffed into the backseat of a taxi, a backpack filled with clothes and personal items sandwiched in between him and Petra the morning he was to leave for the first and last time. Mihael couldn’t lay a finger on the exact reason why he was angry. He wasn’t awake too early; six in the morning was the standard time he woke up at. Breakfast had been decent and easy to eat in under ten minutes. Before leaving, Miss Kosar had given him a few coins, one of them being shiny enough for him to see his reflection in, and wished him a safe trip. Petra was kind to him and offered to let him use her cardigan as a blanket if he was sleepy. The cab driver kept the radio tuned to a station playing German music, though it was low and occasionally interfered with by static noise. Nothing was there to irritate him, yet there he was, eyes heavy lidded and face against the cold window pane of the cab to watch darkened scenery fly past before the backdrop of soft blues melting slowly into pink.

**

In theory, the plane should have been more interesting. Mihael remembered the intense curiosity that filled him when he was younger. He would always need to be exploring, observing, or experiencing as much as possible when exposed to something new. It almost instinctual to him. The following week after receiving Aleksander’s rosary, for instance, Mihael spent an excessive amount of time running his fingers over the beads to memorize their individual textures and sizes, scrutinizing the surface of the pewter to find where specks of the metal had rusted away, and counted the exact number of the beads. Even while at the orphanage, the habit hadn’t waned away completely. Of the hours he spent alone in the dormitory, he’d counted the number of beds (twenty-eight), took inventory of the water leak stains across the ceiling (one very expansive stain that wound from one corner to a third of the way across the entire area of the ceiling, and several other smaller ones), and timed the usual noise level to corresponding general time periods (mornings on Sundays were always very quiet, bordering on complete silence. Sunday afternoons, however, were a completely different story).

The exact opposite is what he focused on during the flight.

After being led by Petra down the rows of faux leather covered seats and settling into the row designated as his by the ticket in Petra’s hand (row 23, seat F), Mihael simply stayed stationary for a good half hour. He wasn’t watching the skies through the rectangular window, watching the city and its red rooftops marked with burnt out gapes grow smaller and smaller. His vision was slowly beginning to unfocus, making the white interior of the plane blend in fuzzily with the navy colored seats.

His eyelids fluttered shut soon after, changing the world into a dark shadow.

**

Mihael had never been the kind of child to nap or fall asleep unless it was nighttime or he was ill and desperate for sleep. He’d usually contained far too much energy and found the concept of napping to be a waste of time. Even though he didn’t frankly have very much to entertain himself with, he still considered it pointless to be sleeping when he could very well be occupying his time doing anything else - reading, watching the events of the day from the windowsill.

Needless to say, he was not used to the groggy feeling of waking from a short nap. The crown of his head throbbed dully in pain from leaning constantly against the hard surface of the windowpane. His eyes felt like they were cemented together, requiring more than a couple tries to fully be pried opened and remain that way. Draped over his awkwardly folded and curled up legs was Petra’s downy cardigan. The cardigan’s owner was still sitting beside Mihael, her head inclined downwards and eyes focused on reading a thick novel with yellowing pages.

Mihael hitched the cardigan up to cover his upper body (the airplane’s cabin was chilly, and his short sleeves were not helping to keep him warm), bringing the fabric up to his chin. Petra hadn’t seemed to notice that he’d woken up. It wasn’t until she’d flipped through several more pages of her novel that she glanced over to see Mihael sitting upright and awake.

“Did you sleep well?” she asked softly, folding down the corner of a page of the book and setting it in her lap. “We should be there in about an hour.”

Mihael nodded slowly. The effects of sleep were still lingering. The surroundings were still blurring together, though it was starting to lessen. His mouth was forced open with a yawn, which he covered with his wrist. Petra was rummaging through a bag she had brought onboard with them, and she extracted another book. It was much thinner than the one she had been reading and appeared to be in much better condition, like it’d never been opened before. After reading the front paper cover of the book, she handed it to Mihael.

_Learning English: Volume One._

The title was in large, bolded blue letters across a tricolored red, white, and blue striped background. Mihael recognized it as trying to mimic the national flag of Croatia. Underneath the title printed in Croatian was a second subtitle, in words he couldn’t recognize, probably English.

“It’s a little present I decided to get you,” Petra explained. She was smiling gently, disregarding Mihael’s blank expression as he thumbed through the pages of the book. “I heard that you liked to read.”

Aleksander had known some English. Mihael remembered asking several time if he could teach him, so that he could be ahead of everyone in his classes. They weren’t supposed to start learning another language until entering primary school. Skimming over the crisp pages of the book, Mihael kept thinking back to Aleksander’s knowing grin when he’d said they could start practicing over the summer. It was Aleksander who was supposed to be teaching him this, helping him as his tongue tied around the difficult syllables and tried to work complex grammar into meaningful phrases. Not a book incapable of congratulating his hard work or flashing the smile that made him feel at home.

“Thank you,” Mihael murmured, closing the book again. He laid it flat carefully on his lap, holding onto it tightly.

Petra seemed genuinely surprised at Mihael’s thanks to her. Maybe it was because he had barely spoken a single word to her thus far. He tried to replicate the smile she was giving him, but it came out slightly crooked and possibly a little intimidating.

“Do you want me to help you with it?” Petra offered. “I know English very well. I’d love to help you.”

Mihael wasn’t entirely certain what to say, but so far Petra had been much like Miss Kosar. She’d never shown him anything but kindness and a genuine caring attitude. With some reluctance, Mihael nodded once more. Petra leaned over towards him, grabbing the book to turn it open to the first section.

Mihael felt the rosary, tucked underneath his shirt and pressed against his chest, begin to feel rather strange. It was like the very touching of the metal and beads against his skin was causing the sensation of loneliness and grief seep through to his heart. Listening to Petra read to him from the book, instructing him on the ways to move his mouth and tongue to create the sounds of the English language and explaining the meaning of the foreign jumblings of letters into Croatian, was almost like listening to Aleksander do the same for him. It was almost mentally draining to sit through. Watching Petra’s long fingers follow after the words she read aloud was reminiscent of the way Aleksander would do the same while he read from their battered and worn Bible. Her steady voice reminded Mihael too much of the voice that read him the Bible when they should have been at church on Sundays.

He managed for the rest of the flight, all sixty-three minutes remaining of it. He repeated the sounds, the words, the basic phrases. He played along with the silly games in the book, pretending that it was not Petra teaching him but Aleksander.

**

London’s Heathrow airport was not what Mihael had been expecting. Of course, the first time he’d ever set foot in an airport was that very morning in Zagreb. He hadn’t been sure of what to expect. All the experience he’d ever had with airports was restricted to Zagreb’s smaller airport, which had been nearly deserted that morning and much smaller.  
Heathrow was massive. The scale was impressive, but not the most intimidating factor.

There were hundreds of people. Hundreds of people who couldn’t appear any less similar to each other. Business workers dressed in fully tailored suits sat right beside entire families including babies, children around Mihael’s age, teenagers, middle aged parents, and wrinkly grandparents. There were groups of travellers appearing to be ready for a vacation, dressed in casual clothing and sporting brightly colored backpacks, and there were also families and individuals dressed in somber and drab clothes, like they were heading to a funeral. It was a complete contrast to the few travellers he’d seen in Zagreb’s airport, most of whom were dressed like they were about to head for work.

He didn’t ask questions when Petra passed Mihael off as her son, and under a false name. She had already explained to him in Zagreb that it was necessary for the time being. He didn’t want to argue about it. If this is what it took to get him away, then she could go ahead and do it. It’s not like he could be persecuted for it, if he had no idea what the reason for faking an identity was.

They had a quick stop at a fast food joint in the airport’s cafeteria. Mihael wanted to try ordering his own food, but he quickly decided against it when he realized just how fluently Petra was speaking to the cashier. He probably would not be able to speak so clearly as Petra had been. When she prompted him to speak up by glancing down to him, he tugged on her sleeve and and whispered quietly that he didn’t want to do so anymore.

He stayed quiet the rest of their trip, letting Petra fill the silence with talk about the school. He rode in the backseat of her personal car, a golden sedan that’s smell bore semblance to flowery perfume that old ladies would wear, half listening as she talked about the history of Wammy’s House, how it was located in Winchester, how the building used to be an older manor house before it underwent very serious modernization and renovation a couple decades ago. The other half of him watched the scenery of the roadway flash by.

It was all green trees, green grass, green bushes. There weren’t any sudden jumps as the car ran over giant cracks in the road. Petra didn’t have to swerve unexpectedly to maneuver around a gaping hole in the asphalt. The surrounding traffic were completely composed of civilians. There wasn’t a roaring military truck in sight throughout the drive. The road sometimes cut through a dense thicket of trees, and other times it ran right through the center of a small town. The houses of those towns were neatly lining the street, near replicas of each other. Mihael may have only gotten a glimpse at the faces of the houses, but he was sure there were no bullets pockmarking the stone walls and no cracked glass being shielded by garbage bags pinned to the window’s frames.

After Petra had seemed to run down her topics to talk about with Mihael (though it really had been a monologue, because Mihael had done nothing more than nod and occasionally agree to something she said), they seemed to be approaching closer to the final destination. The road condensed down into two lanes, and the traffic had started to thin out. To confirm it, Petra announced to Mihael that they would arrive in about five minutes. Nervous tinglings began to rise in Mihael. Here he was. He really was going to be here. Any more than a week ago Mihael would have never imagined himself finally freed from the orphanage in Osijek. He would have been destined to remain there, in the crowded dormitory, being kicked for incorrect prayers, forcing himself to eat. There was no saying that this place, Wammy’s House, was any different, but Mihael was definitely going to give it a chance.

Petra pulled the car onto an exit off the road, a one laned road that’s entrance to was framed by the canopy of a few taller trees. The trees cleared quickly to show wide and expansive fields bordering either sides of the road, lined by low hedges and lavender shrubs bearing light bottlebrush blooms. A couple of times Mihael saw small redbrick cottages with little paths interrupting the hedges and lavender leading off from the road to the dwellings. Eventually, the sight of a tall gate set with iron and stone posts came into sight. Behind the fence was the stone building Mihael recognized as Wammy’s House. The photograph he had practically memorized by now was right in front of him. In the far distance, he could see the towering oak trees surrounding the property. It almost took his breath away. As Petra drove up to the iron gate, she exited the car briefly to approach the nearest stone post holding up the gate’s right side. Embedded into the rock was a large number pad. Mihael watched her quickly pound a long series of numbers into the pad (Mihael caught sight of only the numbers 2, 4, and 9) and return back to the driver’s seat.

The drive continued straight until a circular formation right before a wide gravel path leading to the building. In expansive lawn surrounding the building, there were several small groups of children playing with one another or sitting lazily underneath the shade of a tree. A few of the children had found a distraction in the newcomer, stopping momentarily to watch the car approaching. Petra parked her car at the center edge of the circle and shut the engine off. She turned her head back to face Mihael in the backseat, giving him another of the gentle smiles.

“We’re here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was very difficult for me to work on, which is probably why it took nearly two weeks to write. I'll probably rewrite parts of this chapter eventually.
> 
> I'd really love to hear some feedback on what readers think of this so far!! (don't feel obligated to, though)


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